Since 24 August 2015 WAMC (WebSphere Appliance Management Center) has the ‘withdrawn’ status. This left the people who used WAMC as centralized system to manage their DataPower instances in the cold. IBM came with a solution named … AMC (Appliance Management Center) which is basically WAMC but a little re-branded and turned open source. This opens WAMC capabilities to people who didn’t have the WAMC licenses. Hence the interest in a short introduction.
According to IBM
Centrally manage appliance firmware and configurations across groups of DataPower appliances, and monitor key metrics and events from groups of DataPower appliances
- Web-based user interface
- Support for multiple generations of DataPower appliances
- Firmware management
- Domain and configuration management including support for deployment policies across multiple environments
- Appliance monitoring
So now let’s get it up and running and have a first glance.
Let’s start with the requirements:
– A linux operating system (if you’re crafty you’ll be able to get it working on something else as well)
– Maven
– Appliance Management Toolkit Open Source Edition (it can be found on the github as well)
– Apache Tomee JAXRS 1.7.1
The installation is pretty straightforward and the instructions on the github should get you there.
After installation you should be able to login on https://LINUXIP:8443/amc/
user: wamcadmin
password: wamcpass
This will bring you to the following screen.
Here you can add new DataPower instances and do some management tasks (as shown in the screengrab) on instance level
Moving to the more interesting features however we find ourselves on the domain tab where we can see and manage domains.
One of the nicer features is to update a domain in a fail-over setup (or another situation where configuration has to be in sync). When you select to update the selected domain, you can update it from another DataPower instance with the same domain (the name must be a match)
Of course you have to take into account that front side handlers that are cross domain available will need to be configured by other means, but for updating it can be very useful.
For services you can use a local file or a remote location (an export of the other machine would do)
We can conclude that it’s a nice tool that offers useful functionality for free. It will definitely have its use in environments that have failover capabilities but lack an entire deployment system built around SOMA or AMP.
You can find the github here https://github.com/ibm-datapower/appliance-management-center
Author: Tom V.O.
